Hess, Hitler and Churchill

by Peter Padfield

  Albrecht was with Hess again from 12 to 15 April.91 On the latter day Martha Haushofer recorded in her diary an extended discussion between her husband Karl, Albrecht and Hess in connection with some ‘remarkable news’ – undisclosed – that they had received.92 On the 26th, Hess’s birthday, Albrecht was again in discussion with him, this time at his house in Harlaching. The talk was of the ‘important mission’ to Switzerland on which Albrecht was about to embark.93

  There is no trace of Albrecht ever meeting Hoare or even travelling to Spain.94 The envoy who did succeed in gaining Hoare’s ear during this period was Prince Hohenlohe; he came on behalf of Ribbentrop, for whom Hess had nothing but scorn.

  HOARE AND HOHENLOHE

  Churchill’s instruction to Eden that all German peace feelers should be met with ‘absolute silence’ had been passed to Hoare by wire on 7 February 1941:

  In order to avoid all possibility of misapprehension as to the attitude of His Majesty’s Government, your attitude towards all such enquiries and suggestions should be absolute silence. Nevertheless since these approaches sometimes afford useful information, you should continue to report fully any indication of German inclinations to negotiate that you may receive.95

  The silence was soon broken by Churchill himself. The Japanese proposed to mediate between the belligerents. Declining the offer, Churchill composed a formal statement of British war aims and handed it to the Japanese Ambassador. On 28 February Cadogan forwarded the text to the British Ambassadors in Berne, Stockholm and Madrid:

  the battle which this country is waging is for the overthrow of the system of lawlessness and violence abroad and cold, cruel tyranny at home which constitutes the German Nazi regime.

  It is this system that the peoples of the British Empire, with the sympathy and support of the whole English-speaking world, are resolved to extirpate from the continent of Europe.96

  In his covering letter Cadogan indicated that this memo provided the latest statement of the government’s attitude towards negotiations with Germany, but pointed out that the instructions contained in the previous ‘absolute silence’ telegram still held good.97

  Whether or not Hoare had received this latest notification by the time Prince Hohenlohe arrived in Madrid and asked to speak to him, the line he should have taken was absolutely clear from the original telegram. Still, Hoare granted Hohenlohe an interview. It took place on the 5 March, and it is apparent from his subsequent explanation to Cadogan that he knew he ought not to have talked to him: ‘In the ordinary course of things I would have telegraphed to you before seeing him. As, however, he may be leaving Madrid at any moment it was a case of seeing him yesterday or not at all.’98

  At the Foreign Office it was noted that Hoare’s action was ‘certainly contrary to the spirit if not the letter of our telegram’,99 and Cadogan sent Hoare a mild reproof: ‘as a general rule we are not much in favour of meetings of this sort, which run a risk of disclosure and misinterpretation.’100

  In his report of the meeting Hoare stated that he had seen Hohenlohe in the flat of the British Military Attaché with the attaché present ‘in order that there should be no subsequent misrepresentation of the talk’.101 Hohenlohe’s message had been that the war was a calamity; Hitler had been prepared to make peace the previous July after his great success in the west; why was Great Britain not prepared to make peace after her successes in north Africa? The only result of continuing the war would be the end of European civilisation and the ‘Communisation’ or ‘Americanisation’ of the world. Hitler had never wanted to fight Great Britain and if peace were made now she should find him very reasonable.

  I pressed him as to what he meant by Hitler’s reasonableness. The answer was that Hitler wanted eastern Europe and China. As to western Europe and the rest of the world he wanted little or nothing. He must however have Poland and Czechoslovakia and the predominant influence in the Balkans. Having obtained this answer, I said to him as definitely as I could that for two reasons I could see no possibility of any peace. In the first place no one in England believed Hitler’s word … In the second place the specific terms that he had suggested meant the German domination of Europe, and we were not prepared to accept any European dictatorship …102

  Hohenlohe replied that if Britain would not make peace with Hitler, she would not be able to make peace at all: Hitler was the only man who counted in Germany – after which the discussion stalled, although Hohenlohe was frank about Hitler’s intentions towards Russia: ‘sooner or later, in his view the sooner the better, Germany would have to absorb the Ukraine and the Russian oilfields.’ This passage of Hoare’s report was scored in pencil in the margin, presumably at the Foreign Office.

  Finally Hoare reported that on parting he had made it clear to Hohenlohe that he saw ‘not the least chance of finding any basis for a peace discussion.’

  The despatch Hohenlohe must have sent to the German Foreign Ministry is missing from the archives. However, the Italian Ambassador in Madrid sent a report of a conversation between Hoare and Hohenlohe of about this date, which has been published in the Italian diplomatic documents. It presents a very different picture. By this account Hoare stated that the position of the British government could not remain secure; Churchill could no longer rely on a majority, and sooner or later he, Hoare, would be ‘called back to London to take over the government with the precise task of concluding a compromise peace’.103 He would have to remove Eden as Foreign Secretary and replace him with R.A. Butler.

  This was sent on 14 March, thus nine days after the meeting described by Hoare, but its general tenor is echoed by a despatch, also of the 14th, from the German Ambassador in Madrid which has Hoare saying that ‘sooner or later he had to reckon on Churchill’s resignation and assume that he himself would then be called upon to form a government’.104 However, he would only accept ‘if given a free hand to liquidate the war’. Similar remarks by Hoare were reported from Lisbon on 29 March.105 Both these despatches are missing from the captured German Foreign Ministry documents stored in the Foreign and Colonial Office, London.

  Possible explanations for the opposing accounts of Hoare’s conversation with Hohenlohe are: that the meeting gave rise to rumours, which mushroomed in the feverish atmosphere of Madrid at this time of German pressure on Franco; or that the Germans used the rumours deliberately to spread disinformation, or British intelligence put out stories along the lines of the deception the Double-Cross Committee had long been pursuing. However, it is also possible that Hoare did say these things on behalf of the British peace faction, or even to establish his credentials with the Germans as a future leader of a pro-Nazi Britain behind Churchill’s back.

  It is interesting that the remarks the German and Italian Ambassadors credited him with were not so far removed from reality in the circumstances of that spring. Thus Harold Nicolson at the Ministry of Information noted on 2 March that while he felt the country could resist the worst Hitler could throw at them, the people would become so exhausted it would be difficult to reject a compromise peace if one were offered. When things got very bad there might be ‘a movement to attribute the whole disaster to the “war mongers”, and to replace Churchill by Sam Hoare or some appeaser. That will be the end of England.’106

  Hoare continued to irritate Foreign Office officials with long, excitable and repetitive reports, particularly on the propaganda battle in Spain; and in April he again disobeyed instructions, as noted previously, by spending a week in Gibraltar after travelling to Seville for ‘Holy Week’, and offering no explanation.107

  His stay in Gibraltar coincided with the time from 12 to 15 April when Albrecht Haushofer was in discussions with Hess, and Martha Haushofer recorded in her diary the receipt of ‘remarkable news’.108 The following week it was reported from Vichy France that Hess had flown to Madrid with a personal letter from Hitler to Franco.109 Asked about this, Hoare replied that all his information inclined him to
discredit the story.110 He added that the German Ambassador had been away at Barcelona since the 22nd, the date Hess had reportedly flown to Spain. Further reports had Hess meeting the German Ambassador in Barcelona, but Hoare’s agent in Barcelona could not confirm it: ‘If Hess came here his arrival has been kept remarkably secret and his presence in town is not even rumoured yet,’ Hoare stated.111

  CHAPTER NINE

  Two-front war

  THE ASSAULT ON RUSSIA was scheduled for the latter half of May 1941. A deception operation would be prepared against England, Goebbels noted in his diary on 29 March, ‘and then back like lightning and go straight for it [Russia] … Great victory is imminent.’1 If Hess was to succeed in preventing a two-front war he would have to launch his peace mission to Great Britain before then.

  The United States was another consideration. Albrecht Haushofer had warned Hess the previous September that the British and Americans were on the point of concluding an alliance.2 Secret Anglo–American staff talks initiated by Roosevelt’s administration were indeed held in Washington from January until the end of March 1941, resulting in what was termed the ‘ABC-1’ agreement: in the event of the two powers being engaged in war in the Far East and Europe, the principal effort would be made in Europe. The Japanese Embassy in Washington had learned of the ‘Germany-first’ strategy and informed Berlin.3

  Even more provocatively, in the battle German submarines were waging against British shipping in the Atlantic, Roosevelt had thrown off all pretence of neutrality and moved a so-called ‘US Security Zone’ patrolled by the United States Navy progressively further east into mid-ocean some 2,000 miles from America’s eastern seaboard. He seemed to be angling for an incident whereby the United States might be drawn into the war. Meanwhile American industry was supplying Britain with ever increasing quantities of war materials.

  Behind the anticipation of war against Russia in the east and an Anglo–American alliance in the west lay the shadow of the final solution to the Jewish problem in Europe. On 30 January 1941 Hitler, in his annual speech commemorating the Nazi seizure of power, had repeated the public warning he had given the Jews in January 1939: should they succeed in plunging the nations into war – as meanwhile they had – it would not mean their victory, ‘but on the contrary the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’4

  Why had he recycled his prophecy at this time? The simplest explanation is that he now intended to fulfil it with physical extermination. This, after all, was his deepest psychological war aim; in triumph, as master of Europe, he needed to proclaim it.

  It is abundantly clear that extermination was being prepared. The Madagascar Plan, if ever anything more than a deception, was impossible while Britain remained an enemy and the Royal Navy controlled at least the surface of the seas. The plan now, as perhaps it always had been, was to liquidate the ideological and racial enemy behind the armies advancing into the east.5 Himmler had been given this task, and on 13 March the Armed Forces High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht or OKW) issued additional instructions to accommodate his units in the Russian campaign: ‘In the Army’s area of operations the Reichsführer-SS [Himmler] has been given special tasks … resulting from the necessity finally to settle the conflict between two opposing political systems.’6 The nature of these special tasks is revealed in the orders his chief lieutenant, Heydrich, gave to the commanders of the SS and police Einsatzgruppen who were to carry them out behind the fighting front: all Communist Party officials, Jews in the service of state or party, and all extremist elements were to be executed. It is clear, however, from the testimony of those involved and the massacres that subsequently took place that Heydrich gave oral instructions to execute all Jews whether members of the Communist Party or not, since Judaism was the source of Bolshevism ‘and must therefore be wiped out in accordance with the Führer’s orders’.7

  Beyond this, methods of mass extermination for those Jews already assembled in ghettoes adjacent to railway lines in Poland or about to be sent there were at an experimental stage, but the fundamentals had been worked out and the executives sifted during the so-called ‘euthanasia’ programmes for the mentally ill and ‘unworthy of life’. As for the rank and file who would carry out the lethal work, they and the public at large had been psychologically prepared by Goebbels’ latest and vilest anti-Semitic film, Der ewige Jude (‘The Eternal Jew’), premiered the previous November. In official pronouncements the ultimate fate of the Jews was masked as the Endlösung, or ‘final solution’, to the Jewish question. In May instructions issued under Göring’s authority banned Jewish emigration because of ‘the doubtless approaching Endlösung’.8

  Hess was fully in the picture. As super ombudsman and ‘conscience of the party’ to whom every German had the right to voice his concerns, he was more aware than most of the human consequences of existing anti-Jewish policy in the conquered territories, especially Poland.9 It is significant that at the beginning of March 1941 the party’s racial ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, had turned to Martin Bormann, Hess’s chief of staff and personal secretary, when he wanted to know whether to include a reference to the Madagascar Plan in a speech he was due to make at the opening of a new anti-Semitic research institute in Frankfurt. Bormann evidently advised against, for when Rosenberg spoke at the end of the month he made no mention of Madagascar, simply stating, ‘The Jewish question will only be solved for Europe when the last Jew has left the continent.’10 Hitler had given Rosenberg responsibility for Central Planning for Questions of the East European Area, where the Jewish problem would be solved.

  Hess was to summon Rosenberg for a last-minute talk hours before he took off on his peace mission to Britain, as will appear. It is not known what they discussed, but Rosenberg’s diary has recently been discovered and when released to the public may well yield clues. Until then all that can be said is that Rosenberg, like Hess, was dedicated to an understanding with the British, their racial brothers, and was also deeply involved in the strategy for the conquest of Russia and the ‘final solution’ of the Jewish problem. After the war Karl Haushofer was to suggest that Hess flew to Britain because of ‘his own sense of honour and his desperation about the murders going on in Germany’.11 Hess was on trial as a major war criminal at Nuremberg at this time and Haushofer had to watch what he said. It is possible, therefore, that his reference to ‘murders in Germany’ was a euphemism either for the murders in Poland or for the slaughter planned for European Jews.

  BURCKHARDT

  20 April 1941 was Hitler’s 52nd birthday. Hess delivered his customary eulogy, broadcast on all German stations, as he put it, ‘conveying the thoughts of the entire German people in reverent love’ for the leader under whom they had accomplished the greatest deeds in German history, ending, ‘The German people unites all its wishes for you, my Führer, in the prayer: Lord God, protect our Führer!’12

  It was two days later, according to reports, that Hess flew to Spain. ‘Authoritative German sources’ took the unusual step of denying this in broadcasts the following day,13 while Sir Samuel Hoare, as noted earlier, used a form of words short of denial in replies to the Foreign Office.14

  On the 26th Hess celebrated his own 47th birthday at his home in Munich-Harlaching. Karl and Albrecht Haushofer joined him, and they discussed a visit Albrecht was about to make to Geneva to meet Carl Burckhardt.15 Here again, as with Stahmer’s approaches to Hoare, Albrecht was playing a double game. Ostensibly he was acting for Hess, clandestinely for von Hassell’s opposition circle. The meeting had been arranged by von Hassell’s wife, Ilse, who had told Burckhardt that Albrecht would be coming with ‘a double face’, outwardly for Hess but de facto for the resistance movement.16

  In the report Albrecht was later commanded to write for Hitler, he stated that Burckhardt had contacted him from Geneva with greetings from his (Albrecht’s) old English circle of friends. Believing this message might be connected with his letter to Hamilton the previous September, he h
ad referred it to Hess, who had decided he should go to Geneva. There Burckhardt told him he had been visited some weeks before by a distinguished person well known in London and close to leading Conservative and city circles – Professor Borenius – who wished to examine the possibilities for peace; in discussing possible channels, Albrecht’s name had come up.17

  After the war Burckhardt denied this completely, as of course he had to; at the time he had been a member of the Committee of the International Red Cross and so bound not to engage in international politics. However, he asserted that he did not know any of Albrecht’s ‘old English circle of friends’.18 While this is doubtful, the ‘English greetings’ were almost certainly cooked up by von Hassell and Albrecht at the 10 March meeting in Popitz’s apartment as a way of getting Hess to authorise Albrecht’s journey to Geneva.

  After meeting Burckhardt on 28 April, Albrecht travelled to Arosa to see Ilse von Hassell – something he naturally omitted from his report to Hitler. He told her that Burckhardt, on the grounds of his discussion with the art historian, Borenius, and further talks with English diplomats, still believed England was prepared to make peace on a reasonable basis, but not with the present regime in Germany and perhaps not for much longer. The air raids on Westminster Abbey, Parliament and so on naturally bred increasing hatred.19

  Von Hassell recorded in his diary that Burckhardt had agreed to make further contact with the British and would meet Albrecht again in a few weeks’ time; they would then be better able to evaluate the prospects. Interrogated after the war, Karl Haushofer also stated that a second meeting had been arranged, at which, he added, Albrecht would be flown to Madrid for a conference with Hoare.20 He repeated this with more detail in another interview: Burckhardt had agreed to act as contact man between Hess and the British at some time during the second half of May. Hess was to meet Hoare on an abandoned tennis court near Madrid. Albrecht had reported this to Hess, who had seemed pleased with the success of the meeting, but ‘feeling utterly unhappy about much that happened in Germany and from a mixture of depression, romanticism and impatience’ he had decided to fly to Britain instead.21